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David Cole, designer at Quora

Past releases of iOS have generally centered around major new features:

iOS 6: Maps

iOS 5: iCloud, Siri

iOS 4: Multitasking, iBooks

But if you look at the positioning of the iOS 7 release, the focus is actually not on features, but on the "design" of it. The headline on the iOS 7 marketing page reads:

The mobile OS from a whole new perspective.

You might raise the question, "well, then why did they choose to focus on design in this release?" I think there are a lot of potential answers: overhauling the design was enough work to bite off for a major release, new interaction paradigms benefit from explicitly resetting user expectations, staying fashionable and ahead of aesthetic trends keeps iOS relevant, and so on.

But in any case, Apple is clearly trying to broadcast the fact that iOS 7 has been completely refreshed. The real, substantive improvements are primarily found in the interaction design (as I wrote in my answer to "Is the new Apple iOS 7 look an improvement?") but those changes alone wouldn't necessarily be apparent by just looking at marketing screenshots.

By additionally refreshing more surface-level details like type and color, Apple gets to make a very visceral statement about how dramatically the rest of the OS has changed. Just compare these marketing shots of iOS 6 to iOS 7:

A pretty palpable breath of fresh air, no?

And this wouldn't be the first time Jony Ive made a statement like this. This is his first software project, remember. Here was the status quo when he first joined as an industrial designer: